Mobile stations, such as mobile telephones, smart phones, laptop computers, tablet computers and the like are increasingly being utilized to access large files and high bit rate streaming multimedia content such as computer files, video and audio. This content requires much more data than a traditional telephone voice call. Although the ability to handle this increased capacity demand continues to be met at the air interface side of the network (i.e., between a wireless site and a mobile station), the networks for delivering this information to the wireless sites will likely not be able to achieve the required capacity to meet these demands without substantial, and possibly cost-prohibitive, capital outlays.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a conventional wireless system. In order to provide content to mobile stations, a plurality of content providers (CPs) 101a-101g provides media content to one or more content aggregators (CAGs) 103a, 103b. When mobile station 111 requests particular content, the request is sent to wireless site antenna 110a of wireless node 112a. The request is then passed through network gateway 115, terrestrial network 112 (e.g., a backhaul network) until it reaches the appropriate content aggregator that stores the requested content. The requested content is then retrieved and provided along the reverse path through the terrestrial network 112, network gateway 115, wireless node 112a and wireless antenna 110a until the content reaches mobile station 111.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, more than one wireless site will be coupled to CAGs 103a, 103b through terrestrial network 112. In practice, hundreds of thousands of wireless sites may be connected in this manner. Each wireless site can support a number of users, and accordingly at any given time there could be hundreds of thousands of streams of content passing through the terrestrial network. This is particularly problematic because terrestrial networks supporting wireless sites were originally dimensioned to support low-bit rate voice traffic. Increasing these terrestrial networks to accommodate the high capacity requirements to support the content requests of a large number of mobile stations may be prohibitively expensive.
A conventional technique to minimize the network capacity issues involved user request driven storage strategies, such as caching and predictive caching of data at the wireless nodes. Such techniques analyzed user requests to determine the data that should be cached. These methods are not capable of significantly reducing the network load in order to resolve the problems created by the demand for large files and high speed media distribution. Additionally, because these techniques cache data based on user requests, the first time a particular user requests data it would have to be obtained through the terrestrial network, thus incurring a delay before the data could be provided to the user.